Cosmos Incorporated (4 page)

To the pioneers waiting to leave for outer space, for one private cosmodrome or another, this bright yellow paper with blue printing on it is also known as a claim.

The language spoken in Grand Junction is often translated into dozens of dialects from all over the world, but its basis is Anglo-Saxon, the lingua franca of the twentieth century and the first half of the twenty-first (after that, various bits of Chinese slang had entered the mix). In this language particular to the Cosmograd terminal, there are expressions from the frontier mythology of the mid-nineteenth century—that time of steam locomotives and Colt Single Action guns, and cowboys and Indians. The conquerors and the conquered.

All around him, as he makes his way through the milling crowd at the aerostation exit, between vast concrete-composite pillars made to resemble Minoan columns, the name of that bright yellow paper with blue printing resonates in almost every language on Earth: the Golden Track. The
Sentier d’Or.
The
Pista de Oro.

For Plotkin, the fact that Grand Junction had been able to flourish on “federal indigenous territory”—an Amerindian reserve covering the equivalent of several counties, and straddling the American-Canadian border, no less—was in no way the result of mere chance.

As he picks his way toward the robotaxi station, little by little the tableau comes together. Through the light evening fog, he thinks that he can make out the wavering bunches of city lights. He has an odd feeling that he has not yet been told everything about himself or about this world. He knows, somehow, that this is only the beginning.

He knows that he is going to like Grand Junction enough to be able to kill its mayor without the slightest twinge of guilt.

You must pray as if everything depends on God, and act as if everything depends on us.

The words were those of Bossuet, a French Catholic author from the Great Century; some attributed them to Ignatius Loyola. Why had the instruction program revealed them to him? Why were they contained at all in a clandestine neuro-implant? Why had he remembered them only now?

It was an amusing enigma, like the face of a woman seen in an aerostation crowd. It seemed to have nothing at all to do with his present situation: the robotaxi gliding toward the city; the wide circular avenue running around the periphery of the county in three main branches, each bearing the name of one of the mythical early American space conquests. To the west, Mercury Drive. To the north, the vast curve of Apollo Drive. To the east, Gemini Drive, where he finds himself at the moment, a vast ribbon of concrete regularly dotted with tunnels. The drive is, he notes, a good way to see various parts of the city, lit in successive sequences by the Toyota robotaxi’s orange sodium lights. As they pass the head of Von Braun Heights, he catches glimpses of the cosmodrome itself, with its hangars and its three takeoff runways, one of which is currently awaiting the arrival of a rebuilt Russian Protron resting on its crawler, a sort of giant rover, moving toward the pad from its warehouse at two kilometers per hour.

The second platform is empty at the moment, though he can see the movements of human activity on it, and vehicles, and flashing lights—perhaps there has just been a takeoff? On the third and farthest platform, a replica of a twentieth-century American shuttle points its black muzzle toward the sky, mounted bravely atop the bomb of hydrogen and liquid oxygen that is the enormous fuel tank, wreathed in plumes of greenish smoke that waver in the glare of the spotlights.

“Monolith Hills,” he had told the robotaxi’s verbal interface as he slid into the violet vinyl backseat, with its myriad tiny rips from which protruded nubs of piss yellow foam.

His neuroprogram had informed him of the exact address only a few seconds earlier, while he stood with his hand pressed to the taxi door’s keypad decoder. The Toyota was orange, the color of the Grand-C-Cabs company, and an old Pink Floyd song, “Interstellar Overdrive,” had started up along with the engine. Excellent choice, but it was a remake, not the original; a cover by a robotized Japanese chamber music quartet.

He had been surprised to discover this knowledge within himself, unaided by the instruction program. Was it part of his original personality?

The remake wasn’t very good—he was sure of that, in any case—and he eventually asked the robotaxi to either turn down the volume or find another station. A second later, the strains of a Sinatra tune had flowed comfortably through the car.

Now he is nearing Monolith Hills, where, he recalls, there is a copy of the famous black object from the Stanley Kubrick film.

“Do you have an exact address, sir?” the robotaxi’s artificial intelligence inquires pleasantly as they approach the off-ramp, in a low-quality digital voice.

“Hotel Laika, 38010 Leonov Alley,” he answers mechanically, prompted by the instruction program’s memory bloc.

The Toyota takes the first off-ramp after the long tunnel from which they have just emerged and continues eastward, toward a succession of wooded hills forming a long promontory that rises above the city, along a winding road dimly lit by tungsten streetlamps. He has just enough time to make out a green sign indicating the name of the road—10 South—and several words, phosphorescent in the robotaxi’s headlights, reading:

Cosmodrome—Grand Junction North: Exit 17

Monolith Hills, Voskhod Boulevard, Leonov Alley

To Heavy Metal Valley: Junction Road,

Nexus Road, Xenon Road

Drive Safely

The robotaxi zigzags among the hills, avoiding Voskhod Boulevard “because of traffic; there are road works in progress,” the digital voice explains as it traverses streets bordered by scattered houses, before rejoining the
strip.
Leonov Alley.

The strip covers a little more than forty thousand numbers on the cadastre. It is around twelve kilometers long, following a sort of natural plateau leveling the tops of the hills, and it is here that nearly all of Grand Junction’s shady and bootlegging activities of all types take place. Just outside downtown and the technological research districts of the northern suburbs, like the sordid neighborhoods adjacent to the aerostation, the Monolith Hills strip serves as a channel for frustration, desire, and crime. It is in a sort of orbit all its own: no longer inside the city proper, but not really outside it either.

The Municipal Consortium had probably not planned this situation, but neither had it done anything to prevent it. The Monolith Hills strip is easily accessed from the city; numerous roads cut through the wooded hills to connect with the streets that cross the long neon spinal cord.

The downtown area and its technological suburbs have remained relatively well preserved. They are more presentable to the international media and to financiers, but everyone, including the journalists, knows the Hills are the place to go to get their rocks off.

The strip is a long, seemingly endless stretch of motels, brothels, bars, nightclubs, sex shops, arenas for violent sport, auditoriums, and neuro-electronic game arcades. A motley crowd throngs the sidewalks and crosses the streets in packs in front of the robotaxi, which can legally do no more than blast its horn. It is a different crowd, though, than the one at the aerostation. But it isn’t the same one that was huddled in the arrival area, either; there it had seemed like some of the people had never even left the confines of Enterprise.

This was a similar crowd, but it was not haggard with shock, ready to erupt into violence at the slightest provocation. No, this was the aerostation crowd in two, three, five, ten, thirty years.

Here is the core of Grand Junction’s social security. Here is the jungle. The electric jungle. It is worse than a jungle. It is the secret heart of the city. Death reigns here, a living death.

For a moment, he feels his soul teeter on the edge of an abyss. Then he feels a burning onslaught of sensations and images, as if the instruction program has brutally taken over. Images. Sounds. Voices. High yellow grass on the edge of a vast stretch of brown earth. Men on horseback. Himself, running after a chestnut prairie pony dappled with white spots.

He is a young boy. Someone is calling him:
Diego! Diego!
He runs across the pampas. The sun is dazzling. Men on horseback gallop past him and the pony. The sun is blinding; its rays seem to devour everything. The light is right in front of him—it is terrible; it burns his retinas. It is like an overpowering spotlight shining down on a gladiatorial arena, whirling on its axis atop a pylon.

What is this memory?

Where does it come from?

Argentina?

The Argentina of the pampas? Patagonia?

During his childhood?

The memory is somewhat contradictory to his British recollections, but those took place a bit later on. Perhaps he had emigrated to London at some point? But there was no way he could have run across the vast grassy plains under the pearly blue skies of the Cordilleras at the age of twelve or thirteen while simultaneously pedaling his bicycle through the industrial suburbs of a large Siberian city….

As the robotaxi continues smoothly down the strip, he is forced to admit, frozen with understanding, that his entire identity has been falsified. Something doubtlessly went wrong with the Baikal mafia’s experimental program. It is even possible that most of his memories from that time are purely imaginary as well.

Perhaps nothing is true.

But it can’t
all
be
false,
either.

The second idea is hardly less painful than the first.

After a few more moments, the Hotel Laika appears in the distance at the north end of the strip. It is an enormous structure built of tubular scaffolding and containing hundreds of orange-colored cubicles, around which are webbed corridors and fire escapes. Plotkin notices a double elevator on an external nacelle on each of the four sides of the building, each opening onto a portico leading to the hall and central patio.

It is a capsule hotel, but a most luxurious one as they go. It is part of the Municipal Consortium franchise, UManHome, which he knows finances the campaigns of the mayor and his party.

The hotel boasts two advantages: first, since it belongs to a financial group with connections to his target, Plotkin may be able to gather useful information about the internal workings of the Municipal Consortium; second, because of its position at the top of the wooded spine that forms Monolith Hills, it dominates the entire city.

The robotaxi deposits him in front of the hotel entrance, and Plotkin sees, coming toward him, the first real, living being he has encountered since his arrival on Earth, since his “rebirth” in this body at Windsor, Ontario.

It is a dog.

In the ashy light of the moon and the pale illumination of the streetlamps, the dog looks at first like a vague gray shape, barely distinguishable from the pavement beneath it. It is only because he had stood, mechanically watching the robotaxi drive away, that he had noticed it moving in his direction.

The Toyota has surprised it for a moment with the white glare of its headlights. It is not a “normal” dog at all. Identification parameters, lists of codes and figures, begin scrolling across a portion of his field of vision.

But he knows the important part already.

It is obviously not a normal dog. It is an old army cyberdog; its brain modified via transgenic mutation, implanted with countermeasure systems for electronic warfare.

The dog stays at his heels as he walks into the hotel. He shoots a glance behind him; it is like a gray shadow trotting on the concrete sidewalk that separates the hotel entrance from the street. Plotkin wonders for an instant why chance had decreed that he, of all people, should encounter a cyberdog from the American Aerospace Force in front of a hotel named for the first dog in space, whose holographic portrait, in the stylized fashion of the 1950s Soviet Union, turns slowly above the neon sign.

He knows that there is no such thing as chance.

Or, more accurately, that chance means nothing.

He guesses that the cyberdog and the name of the hotel are closely tied.

What he does not guess is that this tie is of no importance. What he cannot know is that other ties, even stronger ones, are already tightening, or will be very soon.

>
THE MAN

“Are you here for the Centennial?”

The man is around thirty-five cellular years old, fifty in terms of legal identification. The data appears briefly in the upper right corner of his field of vision.

The man is fat, ugly, dirty: repellent. He stinks. When he opens his mouth, an odor reminiscent of the sewer assails the olfactory senses. Plotkin wrinkles his nose. He is sorely tempted to command his neurocomputer to initiate a cortical barrage against this horrid breach of his personal defense system by the real world.

At the slightest movement of the man’s jellylike form, with its puffy face, tiny black eyes peering from between folds of flaccid flesh encrusted with festering pimples, and strings of bluish hair smeared with third-degree anti-UV gel, a wave of putrescent odor is emitted that is feebly and futilely covered by a mixture of eau de toilette, perfume, and other deodorants that add nothing but a note of cheap alcohol to the assault.

It is astonishing proof of Unimanity’s ability to produce something so utterly vile. Plotkin is nauseated; he can hardly believe his senses.

He does not answer the man’s question. He simply looks at him, this human manager of the Hotel Laika, as if observing a sort of marvel.

He forgets a bit of the information the program gave him during the taxi ride. “The Centennial?”

The marvel is a perfect example of the regressive evolution that has taken place in the biological species known as
Homo sapiens.
Five or six million years since the primates of the Pliocene era, Plotkin thinks to himself, have resulted in this. He cannot help wondering if the parable of the Fall did not actually refer to the moment when we dropped out of the trees.

Under the cold light of ceiling bulbs, the baleful eyes blink with a sort of morbid glint. The mouth opens in a thick-lipped grimace, shiny with spit. When he speaks, it is as if the words are oozing from a slimy cavern.

“Yeah, of course the Centennial. You aren’t here for it?”

Plotkin stands paralyzed before this incarnation of humanity on today’s Earth. His first category-three encounter, and it is with this specimen. He actually doubts—like a child; he
is
at that stage of life, after all—if they can both possibly be members of the same species. Impossible. He doesn’t know why, but it is as if all the energy of a previous life has condensed into this figure of truth. He feels a profound, inexplicable sense of disgust, even beyond the objective aesthetic judgment. It is a wave of pure instinct, pure as a flame—but of course that is no excuse.
The habit makes the monk,
it says.
Judge the book by the cover, don’t judge the look by the lover.

Informer,
it says.
SNITCH,
it screams. A direct line to the police.

It seems like part of the plan.

Yes, of course, it must be part of the plan. He’s supposed to brainwash this big pile of shit, to make him swallow a giant lie that will travel through the esophagus of the whole structure of the Municipal Consortium, all the way to the stomach of the mayor himself, and his police.

The snitch watches him. He seems to be waiting for something.

Yes…the Centennial.

“Uh, no. That isn’t the main reason for my visit, but it’s part of it.”

The man licks his lips, which are swollen and bluish—metananodrehynide, by the looks of it. “The Sputnik Centennial, on October 4. So you’re here for a while, then?”

The evolutionary marvel licks his lips again. Plotkin does not answer. All his senses are wide awake, all his bio-implanted scanners fully operational. This is not simple, irrational personal antipathy—even if the man does seem to have been designed specifically to embody everything mankind finds supremely disgusting.

“All of Grand Junction will be at the festival. Are you going to the Starnival?”

Informer. Snitch. Rat. Narc. Bastard.

Smile; just smile. Don’t forget: you’re traveling on business; you work for a seedy Russian insurance company. “Sure, if I can. I’m always looking for a good time.”

Message received. The fat man shows him a smile full of cavities and smeared with cosmetic-antibacterial gel.

“If you’re looking for a good time, especially on that day, tell room service to let me know. There’s nothing the Hotel Laika won’t do for its guests.”

The smile, with its rotten teeth, artificially white against the throat turned blue by dope, blackish, full of ink, flickers. The smile flickers and says,
“Girls for sale. Cheap.”

“I’d like a capsule with a view of the city, if that’s not a problem.”

He doesn’t want to seem like a bullshitter, or to be marked out by the snitch, but he does want to sleep, and then to think calmly about his mission. It does not occur to him, just then, that the instruction program will probably send more information shortly.

The other man shakes his filthy head. “Not at all, sir. The Hotel Laika is at your command. Capsule 108. Faces full west; should be just right for you.”

The man taps his fat, sausagelike fingers on the keyboard of his office nanocomputer. Plotkin takes advantage of the distraction to have a better look at the lobby. His attention is drawn to a small plastic plaque mounted on the wall behind the manager. It is the official authorization to open a hotel for humans, issued by the real estate branch of the Municipal Consortium. It is dull beige with grime—it must be white under the dirt—and inscribed with multiple languages readable by neuroscanner.

“I’ll need to enter your personal identification code. It’s law in Mohawk territory.”

“I know. My encryption system is a bit special; it comes from a company in Russia. Do you have an encrypter that can read Cyrillic?”

The man looks at him scornfully, clearly thinking,
Where do you think you are, the Islamic Republic of Frankistan?
“Give me your disk, please. The Network informs me that you work in insurance?”

Plotkin hands over his personal identification disk, and the man inserts it into a slot in his reader and waits a few seconds, watching the dance of diodes. Red, green, red, green. He hands back the disk.

Plotkin takes it, wiping it surreptitiously on the sleeve of his suit jacket. It seems to be covered with an oily film. “Yes, I work for a Russo-Indian company that specializes in orbital flights. There’s a niche for that here.”

The man laughs. It sounds like a series of farts reverberating in an echo chamber. “A niche? You think?” The laugh dies away little by little in the bluish throat. “This is Grand Junction, my dear sir,” he continues, as if he were speaking of the Parthenon, or the Grand Canyon, or Dealey Plaza. “That isn’t
a
niche here, it’s
the
niche. We’re the only astroport still operating north of Texas, if you don’t count the one in Las Vegas.”

Plotkin smiles, as if realizing his mistake.
Never show an enemy the truth unless you can use it to destroy him,
says one of the Order’s maxims. “Yes, that’s why my company sent me here,” he says. “We insure a lot of flights from Baikonur and Plesetsk. There’s a
market,
is what I meant to say.”

The man relaxes into a conciliatory smile—or his best imitation of one, in any case. “Well, welcome to Grand Junction, Mr. Plotkin. Take the west elevator and go left when you get out.”

“Thank you,” Plotkin says, turning his back, anxious to get away now.

“My name is Clovis Drummond. I wish you a good stay at the Hotel Laika,” the fat man calls after him, adding a dry cackle of a laugh. “You’ve found yourself a good niche, Mr. Plotkin!”

Plotkin is already walking down the hallway with large strides, heading for the west elevator.

Two minutes later, the elevator doors open on the tenth floor, the highest in the hotel. Across from Plotkin, a mesh wall overlooks a square courtyard, which is surrounded by the hotel’s panopticon. Through the grid, he sees the translucent bubble of the central patio where the cafeteria is located; above him is a loft whose tubular walls support an antiradiation protective dome that is obviously not up to code. It is full of visible holes and breaches where ultraviolet rays can stream through without the slightest barrier, in a vast shower of points of deadly luminescence, spilling across the roof and several cracked cement refractory slabs, down his hallway, and right up to the access door leading to the service stairway.

He walks down the corridor; his room is the third to the left of the elevator. He swipes his keycard in the reader and the door opens with a soft humming noise.

The room looks to be up to code: no parasite rays, residual toxic chemicals, ill-timed viruses, or pathogenic bacteria.

Not too shabby for a capsule room; not bad at all, for what it is. There is a Chinese-manufactured NeuroNet console. Upon verification, the water seems to be correctly filtered. The single-occupant room is a rectangle with rounded angles and white walls, its few bits of decor the vivid yellow-orange color characteristic of the UManHome franchise. It measures exactly 4.8 meters in length, 2.8 meters in height, and 3.8 meters in width. It consumes around one hundred kilowatts of energy per hour, is authorized to distribute between fifteen and thirty liters of water a day to its occupant, and is linked to local artificial intelligence by an ensemble of sensors legally approved by the city of Grand Junction. The mouth of a square junk-trap model trash bin juts out of one of the walls; linked to the room’s network of sensors, it rapidly detects the various items of trash left by the occupant and can send out one or more specialized micromachines to retrieve the refuse and bring it to the retractable maw, which then sends it to the hotel’s hydrogen reactor. In a corner near the bed, he sees the cubical stand of a UHU-approved universal altar. It is connected via the network to the NeuroNet console, and is standing by to receive the personal God program of the new occupant of Capsule 108.

It is all perfectly normal.

“
WELCOME TO CAPSULE
108
. THE HOTEL LAIKA IS HAPPY TO HAVE YOU AS OUR GUEST. YOU HAVE PAID IN ADVANCE FOR THIRTY DAYS, THE MAXIMUM ALLOWED, ON AN ACCOUNT REGISTERED TO CITICORP SIBERIA, NOVOSIBIRSK.™

Standard-model hotelier artificial intelligence, Plotkin knows. Neutral, androgynous voice, neither male nor female in accordance with antidiscrimination laws, with very few emotive intonations. Rented software, probably on sale.

It isn’t as bad as a village of particleboard houses, but it isn’t the Ritz, either.

It takes him only a few minutes to undress and run a shower in the collapsible bathroom that unfolds slowly from the side wall. He is irresistibly attracted to the mirror, which reflects the ceiling light, a spray of fiery gold in the little rectangle.

He stands facing his own image.

And doesn’t recognize it.

Which is exactly what he expected.